The field of pharmacy can generally be divided into three primary disciplines:
Pharmaceutics
Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy
Pharmacy Practice
• Pharmaceutics
Pharmaceutics is the discipline of pharmacy that deals with the process of turning a new chemical entity (NCE) into a medication to be used safely and effectively by patients. It is also called the science of dosage form design. There are many chemicals with pharmacological properties, but need special measures to help them achieve therapeutically relevant amounts at their sites of action. Pharmaceutics helps relate the formulation of drugs to their delivery and disposition in the body.[1] Pharmaceutics deals with the formulation of a pure drug substance into a dosage form. Branches of pharmaceutics include:
Pharmaceutical formulation
Pharmaceutical manufacturing
Dispensing pharmacy
Pharmaceutical technology
Physical pharmacy
Pharmaceutical jurispundence
Pure drug substances are usually white crystalline or amorphous powders. Historically before the advent of medicine as a science it was common for pharmacists to dispense drugs as is, most drugs today are administered as parts of a dosage form. The clinical performance of drugs depends on their form of presentation to the patient.
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• Medicinal Chemistry
Medicinal chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry are disciplines at the intersection of chemistry, especially synthetic organic chemistry, and pharmacology and various other biological specialties, where they are involved with design, chemical synthesis and development for market of pharmaceutical agents, or bio-active molecules (drugs).
Compounds used as medicines are most often organic compounds, which are often divided into the broad classes of small organic molecules (e.g., atorvastatin, fluticasone, clopidogrel) and "biologics" (infliximab, erythropoietin, insulin glargine), the latter of which are most often medicinal preparations of proteins (natural and recombinant antibodies, hormones, etc.). Inorganic and organometallic compounds are also useful as drugs (e.g., lithium and platinum-based agents such as lithium carbonate and cis-platin.
In particular, medicinal chemistry in its most common guise—focusing on small organic molecules—encompasses synthetic organic chemistry and aspects of natural products and computational chemistry in close combination with chemical biology, enzymology and structural biology, together aiming at the discovery and development of new therapeutic agents. Practically speaking, it involves chemical aspects of identification, and then systematic, thorough synthetic alteration of new chemical entities to make them suitable for therapeutic use. It includes synthetic and computational aspects of the study of existing drugs and agents in development in relation to their bioactivities (biological activities and properties), i.e., understanding their structure-activity relationships (SAR). Pharmaceutical chemistry is focused on quality aspects of medicines and aims to assure fitness for purpose of medicinal products.[citation needed]
At the biological interface, medicinal chemistry combines to form a set of highly interdisciplinary sciences, setting its organic, physical, and computational emphases alongside biological areas such as biochemistry, molecular biology, pharmacognosy and pharmacology, toxicology and veterinary and human medicine; these, with project management, statistics, and pharmaceutical business practices, systematically oversee altering identified chemical agents such that after pharmaceutical formulation, they are safe and efficacious, and therefore suitable for use in treatment of disease.
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• Pharmacy Practice
Areas of pharmacy practice include:
Disease-state management
Clinical interventions (refusal to dispense a drug, recommendation to change and/or add a drug to a patient's pharmacotherapy, dosage adjustments, etc.)
Professional development.
Pharmaceutical care
Extemporaneous pharmaceutical compounding.
Communication skills
Health psychology
Patient care
Drug abuse prevention
Prevention of drug interactions, including drug-drug interactions or drug-food interactions
Prevention (or minimization) of adverse events
Incompatibility
Drug discovery and evaluation
Community Pharmacy
Detect pharmacotherapy-related problems, such as:
The patient is taking a drug which he/she does not need.
The patient is taking a drug for a specific disease, other than one afflicting the patient.
The patient needs a drug for a specific disease, but is not receiving it.
The patient is taking a drug underdose.
The patient is taking a drug overdose
The patient is having an adverse effect to a specific drug.
The patient is suffering from a drug-drug interaction, drug-food interaction, drug-ethanol interaction, or any other interaction.